It was, of course, impossible. And even if you evacuated a handful of people, you needed somewhere to go, somewhere you could live off the land and not in a spacesuit.

Ideally, somewhere immune to the Moonseed.

…The thought coalesced, like crystals forming in supersaturated solution.

Damn it, maybe there was such a place. But it was a hell of a long way away. And he might be wrong anyhow.

The only way anyone would know would be by sending someone there…

Suddenly, he realized he had to talk to Geena.

From memory, he called the number of her new apartment in downtown Houston. He got an answering machine, saying she wouldn’t be back for days. Dumb, Geena. An open invitation to the bad guys.

He tried JSC, but the receptionist there didn’t seem to believe who he was, and wouldn’t put him through.

He tried the press office.

He got nowhere trying to prove his identity. If he wanted to hear an astronaut, they said, he should log onto the World Wide Web in a couple of hours, to watch an online chat between a group of astronauts, in training for upcoming missions, and a bunch of schoolkids from Iowa. It sounded to him as if the NASA guys had been fielding a lot of shit all day, no doubt the usual end-of-the-world demands and queries and accusations of cover-up that NASA always got when something bad came down.

He thought about that online chat. Maybe there was a way he could break into that.

But he’d left his laptop in Edinburgh. Part of the sunset now. Besides, this hotel room wasn’t exactly geared up for the information age. The telephone cord literally disappeared into the wall rather than terminating in a regular point.

Shit.

He found a telephone directory under the bed. Yellow Pages. It took a while to figure the classifications, but he found what he needed quickly.

He got dressed. He pulled on the jacket the Army guys had given him — a little tight but expensive, smart casual — and stumbled out of the room.

He was carrying his shoes, so he could get down the corridor without a sound, and give his military escort the slip. Apart from the creak of antique floorboards, he did pretty well.

In the hotel lobby, he pulled on his trainers. He pushed his way out of the hotel, into what was left of the daylight.

He called into a news store and bought a Central London map. He directed himself through side streets to Charing Cross Road, and then south, towards the river.

On foot, London seemed overwhelmingly strange. Red pillar boxes. Traffic that was snarled up everywhere you looked, but which still stopped for you at pedestrian crossings, one hundred per cent of the time. Churches and statues and blue plaques telling you who lived in this or that anonymous-looking old house, five centuries ago.